Investing in My Crippled Wife: Every Return Makes Me Stronger

Chapter 162: Purge the Flesh, Forge the Soul [1]

’E...d...r...e....’

The fragmented thought scraped through Soren’s fracturing focus, a desperate mantra repeated over and over against the pulling darkness.

As if this psychic onslaught wasn’t enough, the physical weight of Ethea’s symptoms slammed into him a fraction of a second later. A sudden wave of agony tore through his flesh, racing along his internal pathways and deep into his organs.

The shock of inheriting this on top of his own unhealed lacerations made his ribs feel as though they were being crushed by a tightening vice. Without the stabilizing presence of his passive healing skills, Accelerated Regeneration and Life Force Resonance, he could barely endure the intensity of the pain and almost lost his grip on the connection.

Then came the freezing necrosis.

A dark frost tried to creep up his arms, but his high ice affinity rendered the physical contamination completely useless; his body simply refused to react to it.

Failing to breach his outer defenses, the foreign energy instantly adapted. It bypassed his flesh entirely and dove deeper into his internal system, launching a direct, malicious assault straight on his mana core.

The thorny, black frost vines wrapped aggressively around his remaining pool of mana, attempting to lock down his power source from within. As corruption sought to pierce the center of his power, it collided directly with the third protective layer shielding his core. However, no matter how hard it tried, it was unable to pierce that final barrier, so it could only shift its target and begin fiercely corrupting his existing mana pool instead, turning the pure energy into a volatile, dark sludge.

"!"

A suffocating choke caught in his throat, while blood began to seep from his nose and ears, dripping onto his torn shirt from the sheer internal pressure of the clashing energies. The physical and mental toll was staggering, enough to reduce any cultivator to a helpless wreck.

But Soren refused to break.

Amidst the blinding mental pain and the corruption invading his core, he decisively snapped his eyes open, his dilated pupils flashing with sharp focus. If this dark energy wanted his power source so badly, then so be it. He would give it exactly what it wanted and turn his core into its grave.

Gritting his teeth, Soren ignored the ringing in his ears and the blinding psychic pain splintering his mindscape. He turned his gaze entirely inward, locking onto the dark, sluggish sludge pooling at the base of his power source, and confirmed his suspicion.

Despite being heavily corrupted, its baseline composition was still fundamentally mana, energy that must have once belonged to Ethea. And since it was ice-aspected, it fell entirely under his domain.

With a surge of fierce determination, Soren activated the Glacial Emperor Scripture.

He willed the internal temperature to plunge, forcing the volatile sludge to compress. The dark corruption resisted instantly, thrashing against his control like a trapped beast, sending a fresh, agonizing shockwave through his pathways and mind.

A ragged gasp caught in his throat as the pressure built, making him feel as though his core might rupture from the inside, but he refused to loosen his grip. Under his unyielding focus, his high affinity took hold of the invading force, compelling the defiled sludge to solidify completely and locking the malicious essence into a highly compressed, brittle state.

With a fierce surge of intent, Soren triggered the final step of the refinement.

Crack.

The targeted cluster shattered internally, its chaotic fragments and foreign malice breaking like brittle glass before dissolving into a harmless vapor. The cleansed energy instantly lost its dark hue, melting back into a pristine state and merging with his mana pool.

But the victory was short-lived.

Sensing the loss of its territory, the remaining dark sludge retaliated violently. It flared with renewed malice as it tried to corrupt his remaining pure mana faster than he could freeze it. The sudden acceleration of the corruption sent another spike of pain through his core, threatening to undo his progress entirely.

Soren gritted his teeth, his vision blurring as he fought to maintain his grip amidst the ongoing mental assault.

He also accelerated his execution of the scripture, locking down the rampaging sludge section by section. Every time the corruption tried to spread, he met it with a localized plunge in temperature, freezing it solid before it could take another inch of his core.

One cluster became two. Two became five. Five became ten...

As he got the hang of it, the momentum shifted entirely in his favor. His processing speed increased, allowing him to freeze, shatter, and purge the invading force with mechanical efficiency. The cursed energy’s frantic retaliation grew weaker as its volume dwindled, entirely unable to match the relentless pace of his refinement.

With one final, decisive surge of intent, Soren crushed the last remaining pocket of resistance.

The last of the black ice shattered, leaving no trace of the contamination behind. As the massive wave of newly purified frost mana flooded into his core, it started pulsating with a revitalized strength.

That physical victory, however, did nothing to stop the psychic assault still raging inside his head.

Even though his Unyielding Spirit and Pain Resistance abilities managed to reduce the mental toll by a small margin, the relentless mental noise kept his mindscape fractured, blunting his senses and cutting off his ability to perceive anything or anyone else.

He wanted to know if Ethea was safe, but he couldn’t feel her condition through the chaotic haze anchoring his own thoughts. This inability to perceive her situation grated against his instincts, creating a sharp friction within his trapped consciousness.

A moment later, clawing against his own sensory blindness, a spark of ruthless realization ignited within his fracturing focus as the next set of crushing blows continued battering his sanity.

He... He was looking at this entirely the wrong way.

Desperately fighting the mental assault was pointless, and sitting there to endure it was equally foolish. If his cultivation technique could freeze and shatter corruption within his physical power source, he could apply that exact same logic here.

The relentless psychic pressure was not an obstacle; it was an opportunity.